Does the Vatican have a Time Machine?

Link courtesy of Philos.

Commence salivating

Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia

STAR WARS Technical Commentaries: Jedi & Sith

"The Phantom Menace reveals several new and interesting aspects of the Force, or at least a previously unheard representation of the Force favoured by the Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn. This topic deserves inspection, but it also deserves great caution. The Force is a vast mystery to the inhabitants of the STAR WARS universe. We as a movie audience should not be hasty in assigning mechanistic interpretations to it on the basis of just a handful of lines of dialogue, especially when there are at least two further episodes due which may contribute as much new information as The Phantom Menace."

My favorite Star Wars page of them all.

Jet City Orange is another good Seattle blog.

Let's WARCHALK! presents a hobo language for wireless networks.

New SAT Writing Test Is Planned

"'The nice thing about a writing sample is that we know the author is the author,' said John Barnhill, director of admissions at Florida State University. 'With the essays we get on the application, we often wonder what it looked like before it went to the parents, the teachers, the 15 people who may have read it and made suggestions.'"

Martha Stewart's To-Do List May Include Image Polishing
"Her peers in the media world, however, say that she has not stored up enough goodwill for them to stand by her through this crisis. "People are more than happy to see her end up as a whiffle ball for New York media to swat around," one publishing executive said."

Making enemies in New York doesn't make you a bad person. Go Martha Go!

SO COOL

Cat and Girl is cool. Like Calvin and Hobbes, only Calvin is a moodly little girl and Hobbes is a turtle-neck wearing cat who towers meanacingly over Girl.

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Meet Steven Spielberg, hardboiled cynic
"And if he will never be Kubrick, he has become fully Kubrickian."

Philos has noted that he has been sending me links for the blog, but that I haven't credited him. My apologies. Consider Philos credited.

VillainSupply.com Home Lair

"SUBTERRANEAN ISLAND BASE WITH OPTIONAL VOLCANO UPGRADE

When you graduate from villain to Supervillain, your lair must also graduate from a lair -- to a SuperLair. That's why Volcanic Island Contractors is the NUMBER ONE manufacturer of secret lairs in the world! Your private island comes equipped with a secret underground submarine bay, Master Bedroom, a 40-room luxury villa, atomic reactor, missile/laser launch bay, command room, T3 lines included, shark trap, billiards room, cybernetics lab, full bar, housing and facilities for up to 250 henchpersons, private suites for up to 12 beautiful bikini women, and convenient, obvious self-destruct mechanism. Buy the volcano upgrade, and get a free Nikon Digital Camera!"

mc.clintock.com

There is an Ikea moment.

'Thinking' robot in escape bid - theage.com.au

"He later found it had travelled down an access slope, through the front door of the centre and was eventually discovered at the main entrance to the car park when a visitor nearly flattened it with his car. "

Escher Paving Stones

Salon.com People | Spelunking the empire of death

"There are 560 miles of abandoned medieval quarry tunnels under greater Paris, the largest network of rock tunnels under any city in the world. The catacombs, as they're known, run at depths of anywhere from 20 to 120 feet, honeycombing the arrondissements of the Left Bank and the suburbs south of the city proper. They can be entered from Metro tunnels, utility systems, church crypts and the basements of homes, hospitals, lycées and universities (there's even an entrance in the deepest reaches of Tour Montparnasse, Paris' one skyscraper)."

Some cautionary words on the evils of having an incompetent domain name registrar.

Company salvages good deals from certain demise at the dump

"We try to carry things that people can put into their homes with minimal fuss."

WARNING! Gigantic productivity bomb ahead.

Twist, a word game. Link thefted from Zannah

Write and essay, win a bookstore in Oregon

Visible Barbie Project

Even I hestitate to blog this.

Democratic Underground Forums - Ohio State fascism - What happened today

Salon.com Politics | Bush doesn't raise child abductions during Saudi talks

"It involves laws of a sovereign nation that the United States cannot control."

Juxtasposition

Honda Takes Up Case in U.S. for Green Energy

"Honda is the only major automaker that has not joined the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the industry trade group that has led the fight against tougher fuel and emissions standards."

ABCNEWS.com : AP Corrects Ancient Canals Story

"The transportation canals are about 1,700 years old. Some irrigation canals located near Tucson, Ariz., are about 3,000 years old."

Everything you knew about Archaeology is wrong.

Hidden Moscow

"To preserve her treasures from raids and fire, Sofia employed a famous Italian architect, Aristotle Fiorovanti, to build a library under the Kremlin. Today, the location of the library is covered by a veil of mystery and legend. Sofia's grandson, Ivan the Terrible, was said to have found the treasure. If so, he took the secret of its location to his grave. Napoleon; a Polish king, Sigizmund; and thousands of lesser-known people have since searched for the library"

US Proposes Legistlation Authorizing Invasion of Holland

"Despite their opposition though, the parliament did not consider it a serious scenario that the US would make use of the legislation and a Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman also said it was unlikely that US warships would be positioned off the Scheveningen coast."

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Astronomers hail planetary discovery

"Astronomers have discovered a planetary system around another star that is similar in scale to our Solar System."

Welcome to Freezepop-land!

Freezepop is a very cool synthpop band from the Boston area. Check it out!

Art Garfunkle Interveiw (from 1999)

"In the Appalachians of West Virginia, the sun was going down and I was stuck for a place to stay. I knocked on the door of a private farm house. Three college-age girls were in the middle of an LSD trip. They recognized me as Art Garfunkel. I learned that they were three of thousands (millions?) who are "invisible" - pay no taxes, avoid the census taker; they are not on America's books."

Games Workshop has release new assault rules for Warhammer 40k. So what happens when a player who's *not* a psycho web-surfing game fanatic who checks the game news every day supposed to do when he/she shows up at a tournament, only to find that the rules have randomly changed in the meantime?

The Cityscape Project

I WANT ONE!

Salon.com News | Cheney: U.S. may strike first

"The United States will not shy away from first strikes when it acts against terrorists, Vice President Dick Cheney told a group of world conservatives Monday."

Winds of Change

I haven't had much chance to review this, but there's some interesting (read frightening) information about fallout patterns from a possible nuclear conflict in India.

ABCNEWS.com : Archaeologists Find Ancient Canals

Is the Universe a big computer?

Pat Buchanan Weighs in

"Evil though they may be, Islamic killers are over here because we are over there."

Tron 2.0 Images

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Can Moby save pop?

"Many of the reasons this is currently Moby's moment have little to do with the music on his new album, '18.' There was a vacancy in the hip new thing department, and Moby, fresh from the sales triumph of 'Play,' was a decent if awkward fit."

Moby's stuff is wonderfuly unpretentious, which goes a long way with me. I hear the new album is very good too. I'm sure that Moby's going to survive fame and keep doing great stuff for us for years to come.

BBC News | EUROPE | Magician priest wants patron saint of magic

"Don Silvio Mantelli, a Salesian priest from Turin, presented a magic wand to the Pope earlier this year and asked for the title to be given to a 19th Century Italian priest - Saint Giovanni Bosco."

Link thanks to Phil-"thaumaturgy"-os

Did you ever wonder what it would be like to see a water balloon pop in space?

With some schweet quicktime movies of the event.

Bush: U.S. Will Strike First at Enemies (washingtonpost.com)

"President Bush told future Army officers today that the United States can no longer deter attacks from other nations by threatening massive retaliation, but instead must strike looming enemies first."

Text of speech here

Yahoo - MSNBC.com Launches Weblogs. We'll see if they're any good.

Morbus over at Disobey.com has a new project going on: The Horror Section : News and Downloads. I'm not a horror fan myself, but there are some great scans of classic comic covers that are pretty wild.

The 1000 Journals Project has updated their site with some scans of one of the journals, and some pics of the covers of several others.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | US net porn law overturned

"Three federal judges said the law forcing libraries to use internet filters designed to block pornography went too far."

OnlyOnCapitolHill News
"Artis The Spoonman In Recovery From Heart Attack
How To Help Out and keep Artis Alive and Flailing."

Spoonman has been playing the spoons down at Pike Place Market for years. There was a great article about him in Real Change. I'll blog it if I can find it online.